A choice that football coaches have to make after every touchdown – whether to get the relatively easy point or risk it by going for two – offers helpful insights into why Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (the economy’s coach) decided to raise interest rates this...

The climate change agreement adopted by 195 countries in Paris last week raised the profile of forests in ways never seen before.

In past multilateral environmental conferences, deforestation proved too thorny for nations to reach agreement. Now, however, some of the most heavily forested...

In every culture that anthropologists have ever studied, people tell stories.

Families most frequently tell stories around the time of vacations, family reunions, (sadly) funerals, Thanksgiving and, of course, the family-oriented winter holidays of Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

Stories are told...

It must be a terrible burden knowing that you might have to make a quick decision about whether to yell at someone, shock them, or shoot them dead. That is the weight inherent in...

After witnessing the overwhelming popularity of Star Wars, director Francis Ford Coppola told George Lucas he should start his own religion.

Lucas laughed him off, but Coppola may have been onto something.

Indeed, the Star Wars saga taps into the very...

As highly social animals – like human beings – elephants rely on their bonds to navigate everyday life. Group living helps elephants with the difficult decisions that they make on a regular basis – what to eat, where to go when the water dries up, how to parent....

Though today regarded as the literary titan of the Victorian age, in late 1843 the 31-year-old Charles Dickens worried that his popularity was fading. His latest novel was not selling well, his finances were strained and his wife was pregnant with their fifth...

A man’s reach should extend his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? – Robert Browning

The international community has been negotiating on climate change since 1989, but the Paris Agreement marks a real step forward....

If, as cliché has it, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, isn’t the recent flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at bringing about a negotiated settlement to the Syrian civil war insane?

None of the previous attempts to...

Once the three-billion-letter-long human genome was sequenced, we rushed into a new “omics” era of biological research. Scientists are now racing to sequence the genomes (all the genes) or proteomes (all the proteins) of various organisms – and in...